If you didn’t know who Dick Proenneke was before listening to Men as Trees’ latest release, Weltschmerz, you will surely be ordering Alone in the Wilderness after a few listens. Men as Trees, a four-piece instrumental/screamo outfit from Auburn Hills, Michigan, have released an album that has taken the best of both post-rock and screamo worlds and melded them into a 45 minute keeper.

I am always a fan of raw sounding recordings, as long as they are cohesive, still listenable, and give me the sense of a great live show. Weltschmerz definitely has this raw sound, making it stand out from the rest of today’s albums in an unusual fashion. The imperfectness of the guitar playing and slightly off moments on the drums are almost endearing, but nothing short of extremely dynamic. The instrumentation is mostly a four piece (two guitars, bass, drums), but other instruments pop up throughout the album, such as strings, acoustic guitars, Rhodes piano, and the ever-popular melodica (after hearing some older tracks, I believe the band has taken a strong liking to this instrument).

No vocals enter on the first track until almost the 9:00 mark, yet the band effectively uses gang vocals, especially in tracks like “If there was any wisdom left they would send it back up the mountain.” Singer Jason Kallicragas uses a very low and vibrato tone when he is singing by himself over trickles of interweaving guitars; it’s almost a toned down version of the screaming instead of him trying to sing melodically. Don’t forget about the killer “ohhhhs” on the last track of the album, which I’m sure are incredibly bone-chilling in a live setting.

The band has released quite a few recordings to date (all of which are free on their Myspace), and a few of the songs on Weltschmerz are older songs that are now slightly more polished. Although I used the tag “post-rock” earlier in this review, the instrumental portions of this album are not your typical buildup and builddown epic-ness that usually comes with that tag. The guitar parts (courtesy of the Kallicragas brothers) are well written, generally avoid the ever-present double picking cliché, and create dark harmonies that fit the theme of the album. After doing a little research, I discovered that Weltschmerz is a German word that means “mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state.” Maybe this is what Dick Proenneke was feeling when he decided to…well you can find out by yourself.

- Ben Hoffman